'A Very British Scandal' Has Lots of Drama But Little Heart

A Very British Scandal is the second installment in the rather loose anthology series originally kicked off by 2018's A Very English Scandal. And perhaps we can blame the name change for the series' sudden shift in quality—it's meant to reflect the setting's move from London to Scotland, but will likely just confuse viewers about whether the two properties are connected at all. But where English Scandal used the sordid conflict at the series' center as the mechanism by which to explore both its central relationship and a specific cultural moment in English history, its British cousin seems content to simply titillate, recreating shocking moments but giving them by way of little larger context.

On paper, the contentious and very public divorce between Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, and his wife, Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, offers no end of fascinating historical details. The fact that Ian divorced his second wife Louisa in order to marry Margaret Sweeny, a rich, society figure with a fairly shocking reputation of her own is just the tip of the iceberg of their messy story, which includes scandals that run the gamut from her rumored affairs with celebrities and powerful politicians to his alleged physical abuse. There's so much drama to be mined here, it's a wonder that anyone waited this long to adapt this story into a television series.

The problem, however, is that A Very British Scandal is so fascinated by the salacious details of the pair's various transgressions, that it forgets to tell us who they are as people and, as a result, fails to make us care about them in any real way. Instead, the three-episode series jumps almost immediately into simply telling us how miserable and cruel they both are, leaving viewers to wonder why on earth we ought to care whether they get married or divorced or simply destroy one another along the way. They both seem like pretty vile people, after all.